The Vienna Melody (32 page)

Huddled in a corner, his legs drawn up, his hat pulled low over his forehead so that the light and the evil smells would not be too annoying, he told himself that he had nothing to do with the people here nor they with him. Not with Czerny, not with any of the others. They were common, coarse, smelly, and had no use for the things that were important to him. Moreover, they were his born enemies. It was ridiculous that he was sitting there as though he belonged to them.

But Fritz said once (or was it Ebeseder?): man is innocent of one thing only, and guilty of everything else. That one thing is his birth. The longer Hans sat there and tried to sleep, the more that saying, which earlier had never meant much to him, stuck in his mind. “We too should have preferred to be born rich,” Czerny had said to Papa. That was clear. That fellow over there, who reeked a yard away of cheap liquor, could not help that he had not come into the world as the son of a piano-maker, or as an archduke, or as a young Baron Rothschild. Consequently …

The “consequently” opened such an immeasurable train of corollaries that the perplexed youth made renewed efforts to get to sleep. Would Papa have told Mother where he was? It was incomprehensible that he had called the police to his aid! He might have discharged the men. He could have given them time to think things over …

His thoughts blurred, he fell asleep. But something awakened him at once; at least it seemed to him that it was at once. In any case, he now remained awake. Recalling the thought that was in his mind before he fell asleep, he pursued it. His head was clear now. There was one question of responsibility to be answered. Did the fact that these ragged and drunken creatures were not responsible for having been born make others responsible? Whom? Their parents, of course. And who was to blame for them? Their parents, of course. He realized that this was a shabby solution, and he decided to state the question differently. Since these creatures had been born into the world as beggars through no fault of their own, was the world responsible for letting them go on being beggars? Since they could not help their parents being poor and I cannot help my parents being rich—Hans hesitated before reaching the conclusion he felt impelled to accept—then they have a claim. On whom? On me?

In the twilight of early morning which cast a pallid light over these pitiful beings this new problem presented itself to him with such harshness and trenchancy that again he closed his eyes on it. Until now no one had made him see it or even guess that it existed. Neither at home nor in school had there ever been any talk of it. It was not to be found in his favorite books. Schnitzer's heroes were well-to-do middle-class burghers. Hofmannsthal's heroes were classic Greeks or modern princes. Thomas Mann told the stories of problem sons of patricians. To have the problems which arose in popular novels their heroes were obliged to have money. People who had no money did not appear either in books or in polite conversation. One simply did not associate with them. It was a sort of Stigma. Mother called poor persons just “the people.” The inscription over the main entrance to the Liechtenstein Gallery, which he often saw in passing, was couched in these words: “To Art, to Artists—I, Prince of Liechtenstein.”

 

“I'd like to know what you are doing in this mess!” exploded Uncle Otto Eberhard, to whose office Hans had been taken after being put through an inconclusive police hearing early in the morning. “It's a disgrace and a scandal!”

He laid the morning edition of the
Catholic Reichspost
in front of Hans, having marked with a blue pencil the following lines: “An old and renowned manufactory of musical instruments in the Fourth District was the source of the lamentable disturbances of yesterday.”

“That it's a disgrace and a scandal not to give those poor devils fifty hellers more a week and that instead the police were called in, yes!” boldly retorted Hans, tense and feverish from being rushed at thus.

Otto Eberhard had recently celebrated his seventieth birthday. With all the honor due to a man of his merit, proper notice had been taken of the occasion; there were brief articles in the newspapers, a eulogy by the Minister of Justice, and the cross of a commander of the Order of Francis Joseph was graciously conferred on him. His whiskers, trimmed with painful precision on either side of his shapely and slightly wrinkled face, no longer had a single dark hair in them. The carefully parted hair on his head was also quite white now, and its silvery sheen was reminiscent of his dead aunt Sophie. In general his likeness to her was emerging as Otto Eberhard's cheeks grew thinner and his always erect body grew lighter.

“You look a sight,” he said to his nephew, whose appearance had suffered from the night spent in the lock-up. After a pause, in which he drew a handkerchief from an inside pocket, unfolded it, touched his lips to it, and then carefully restored it to its resting-place, he leaned across to where his nephew sat opposite him. The scent of Eau de Cologne, which he liked to diffuse, grew stronger. “In other words you admit a connection with these people!” he now concluded.

“It's so mean!” his nephew declared.

“What do you consider so mean?” Otto Eberhard asked.

“Papa makes hundreds of thousands out of his factory! He could have agreed to the fifty hellers for them and felt the loss of it less than that!” Hans said, flicking off a blade of straw which had clung to his sleeve from the previous night.

The uncle followed the wisp of straw with his eyes. “Then you think it's only a question of fifty hellers?”

“But that is absolutely clear, Uncle!”

Then, with a tone of finality which greatly impressed the excited youth, the Public Prosecutor declared: “In that assumption you are fundamentally wrong. It is neither a question of fifty hellers nor of five thousand crowns. It is not even a question of money, but of something beyond all price, the loss of which one would feel not as little as that dirt you have not yet fully removed from your disordered clothing, but would suffer from even more painfully than a deadly illness. It is a question of the principle of justice in making a demand. Since life consists of making demands, it is a question of life itself.”

“Yet they had justice on their side in asking for an increase in wages,” Hans put in rather uncertainly. “They say that meat and bread prices have risen 25 percent, and they ask for a 16 percent, rise!”

“That is their version. But you overlook something. Since Herr Victor Adler abstracts from their wages as much as he thinks he needs to run his Social Democratic party machine and thereby enable himself to play his part, this is already the third increase in wages which they have demanded. The third in two years. Did your informants tell you that?”

Hans began to have a sense of inferiority in the face of this impeccably dressed man who had not a speck of dust about him nor a grain of doubt about the order of things. One never could prove one's point to Uncle Otto Eberhard. It had always been that way. “I know that one can't live on such wages,” Hans insisted.

“Really? And how do you know that?” His questioner appeared determined not to tolerate any emotion, and to maintain the rarefied atmosphere of a supreme court in which humanity is fanned to make way for principles. “If the workers did not have to make the payments required of them, not by their employers but by Herr Adler, they would at all times have abundant means. They may not, as they say in their jargon, ‘have enough to gorge,' but they have more than enough even now, as proved by police statistics, to get drunk on.”

“The party dues are to their advantage!” Hans said.

“Possibly. That's not entirely out of the question. At least those benefactors of humanity, Messrs. Adler, Ebeseder, and Oppenheim, maintain that is the case. You went to school, if I'm not mistaken, with young Ebeseder, the son of the secretary to the party?”

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

“It crossed my mind. He's under indictment for
lèse-majesté
and rioting.”

“He's the decentest sort of man.”

“He'll be given every opportunity to prove himself one. But let us stick to the subject. We were speaking of the justice of making demands. There are—and this is something I wish you would bear clearly in mind—limits to the means employed in making demands.

“Whoever cloaks his demand with extortion puts himself in the wrong, even if his demand were justified. For any demand, even an unjust one, could be extorted by a strike. Do you grasp that?”

Hans hesitated to express himself when confronted with so much accumulated logic even though to him it seemed to contain a rift. He made an effort to discover that rift.

“I see that you're thinking it over,” his uncle said. “I shall help you. Is it clear to you that it is not the workers in your father's factory who are fomenting a strike but Messrs. Victor Adler, Ebeseder and Oppenheim? That it's not your foreman Czerny who thinks that wages should be raised but these other gentlemen? Have you understood that?”

“Naturally,” Hans said.

“It is less natural than you imagine. In fact, it is absolutely unnatural. Nature creates degrees. An oak is higher than a bush. The lion is bigger than a worm. Messrs. Adler and comrades—who since yesterday arrogate to themselves the right to rule in Austria—are, to put it in exaggeratedly polite terms, inferior to His Majesty the Emperor. His Majesty the Emperor governs in Austria. Not Herr Adler.”

“I thought that Parliament governed in Austria,” Hans contradicted. The infinite arrogance in his uncle's every word so embittered him that he could not find the demolishing retort he sought.

“I congratulate you on the results of your association with our home-grown Beethoven Fritz!” Otto Eberhard remarked scornfully. “Yes, Parliament governs. But it is a callow Parliament which carries Parliamentarianism to absurdity because its conduct reminds one of nothing so much as the antics of a lot of young scamps during recess at school. Therefore His Majesty keeps finding himself obliged to pack these scamps, who call themselves representatives, off home and to take the measures which are dictated to him by his wisdom. Do you propose to say that Herr Adler should prescribe to His Majesty?”

“If he knows better,” said Hans, who thought he at last had his answer ready. “What makes you think the Emperor knows better than Herr Adler?”

Whereupon a deathly silence fell. Otto Eberhard, who was in the process of lighting a Virginia, had to lay the long, thin black cigar aside for a moment, his hand trembled so. “That exceeds all comprehension!” he exclaimed.

Meanwhile in the next room an exchange of words became audible, and immediately afterwards Henriette entered the lawyer's office, into which the morning sun was now throwing its full rays.

“I beg your pardon!” the old gentleman said indignantly. “I am in conference!”

But the mother had rushed over to her son and now held him close in her arms.

“Henriette,” Otto Eberhard said to his sister-in-law, “I must urgently insist that you leave me alone with this young man. We're not through yet.”

“He has done nothing!” answered the frandc mother. “I shall not leave until you promise me that nothing will happen to him!” Otto Eberhard nodded. “It's a matter of form,” he said with disgust. That was all.

“It really would be better, Mother, if you waited outside for a little,” Hans put in. It made him shy for her to embrace him and plead for him. This was no family matter, and he was no longer a baby.

But Henriette thought differently. With flashing eyes she measured her old adversary. “I don't see why I should leave the room! I am his mother. I know him better than you. He has done nothing wrong!”

“Victor Adler, David Oppenheim, and Company,” remarked the elderly gentleman, omitting Ebeseder, the one Christian, from the list. “All that has its natural reasons,” he added, in case anyone might doubt his meaning.

Here, however, he had taken a step beyond what was favorable for the purpose he was pursuing. Hans's opposition, which had died down with his embarrassment, now flared up violently and, hot with anger, he said: “Just when you sent for me, Uncle, the police official was saying that all I had to do was to explain that I only spoke to the workers on Papa's behalf and that I was on the point of offering them to mediate, when the police arrived. If I do that then the incident would be closed and my arrest was made in error.”

“And you will make that statement forthwith,” assumed Otto. Eberhard, his mouth drawn down in the corners with exasperation.

“I refuse to make it!” Hans contradicted.

“Don't be crazy!” his mother warned. She had been through a similar situation in her own life. An old and inimical man had demanded a statement from her and she had refused to make it. She was twenty-two then. Now she was forty-five. Twenty-three years make a difference.

Otto Eberhard rose. He was almost taller than his late aunt Sophie and stood just as erect. “I am not interested in your statements,” he said to Hans, laying a world of distance between himself and the other two. It was the same world he had disapproved of when his brother first let himself be taken in by this pretty face. Not even the face was pretty any more. The unmerciful morning light brought out lines and shadows, emphasizing them unnecessarily.
Jewesses age early
, the lawyer reflected. “Take your offspring along with you,” he said. “He does you absolute credit.” And to Hans he remarked, in a tone of finality: “You are not going to do any play-acting for me. If your unfortunate father allows anything of the kind, that's his affair.”

“You're neglecting your duty, Uncle!” countered the emboldened boy, now stung to the quick. “I declare—and you, Mother, are a witness—that what I said to the workers was that they were in the right!”

“It is eight-thirty,” called the Aulic Councillor and Public Prosecutor through a speaking tube, which put him in direct communication with his associate in the next room without his being obliged to have recourse to that distasteful instrument—a telephone. “And I must go to the Minister of Justice. Will you kindly look after this lady and gentleman for as long as they care to remain?” He took up his stiff felt hat, gloves, and brief case and left. He was on his way to present to the Minister of Justice a projected law entitled “A Supplementary Statute to Paragraph 98 of the Penal Code,” which ran as follows: “In accordance with Paragraph 14 of the Fundamental Law of December 21, 1867, I hereby order: In amendment of Paragraph 98 of the Penal Code strikes are to be considered a crime of extortion. Strikes, interruptions of work, slowing up of work, which serve as a violent means to obtain demands, shall henceforth be classed as crimes
sui generis.
Such
 
crimes and incitement to them
 
will be punished by death and attempted crimes with up to twenty years of imprisonment with hard labour.” Francis Joseph's signature to this document, to be countersigned by the Minister of Justice, would, such was Otto Eberhard's hope, finally restore the criminally impaired limits of decency. And although the Imperial signature was not forthcoming, the rumor of the Minister's having signed it, which spread like wildfire, was sufficient to precipitate a train of development which became known as the “Battle of Vienna for the human rights of the Proletariat” and which spread from Vienna to the rest of the world.